Fernando Alcoforado*
1970 was one of the tensest years in the history of Brazil and of the military dictatorship itself. In 1969, urban guerrillas broke out across the country and the kidnapping of an American ambassador revealed to the world what the military had denied so vehemently about the existence of torture in the country. The year of the World Cup began with another kidnapping, of the consul of Japan. A bloody hunt began for the guerrillas who opposed to the military regime. The purpose was to hunt down all who were opposed to the military dictatorship, guerrillas or not, and to eliminate them, in a condemnation by default to a pre-determined death penalty.
In 1970, the Brazilian team won the three-time world championship in Mexico. The Brazilian soccer team of 1970 was considered by many the greatest of all time. This achievement was considered a heroic feat in a show transmitted for the first time to the Brazilian people through television. With strong coverage in the media of then, the victory of the Brazilian selection in 1970 was used like instrument of propaganda of the military dictatorship. Soccer would never be as well exploited as propaganda of a government in Brazil as it was in 1970. The Jules Rimet Cup was erected by President Emílio Garrastazu Medici himself.
Just before the start of the championship, João Saldanha, a coach who qualified Brazilian soccer team for the World Cup, was dismissed for political reasons and was replaced by Mario Jorge Lobo Zagallo. During the World Cup, Brazil entered the field, eliminating all opponents, in an anthological performance of a fabulous cast with the presence of Pelé, Tostão, Rivelino, Jairzinho, Gérson, Carlos Alberto Torres and Clodoaldo among others. While the people were delirious with the goals, the economy reached the height of what was called “Economic Miracle”, showing a prosperous and happy country. In the cells the prisoners were tortured, dead and missing. On the radios, the World Cup anthem echoed to the ninety million Brazilians: “Pra frente Brasil” (Brazil forward).
As in the World Cups of 1958, 1962, 1966, 1970, 1974, 1978, 1982, 1986, 1990, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014, Brazilians bought green and yellow flags and shirts to display their “love to the motherland” and paralyzed their activities during games to see twenty-two men running after a ball. Who does not know Brazil, thinks there is a true patriotism here, but unfortunately it is not what happens. “Patriotism” is only seasonal in Brazil, only occurring during the games of the soccer team and the World Cup. The same is repeated during the World Cup in Russia. Football has become a circus for the Brazilian people by making many alienated people consider the World Cup as the most important in their lives. Roman emperors adopted the bread and circus (Panem and Circenses) policy to keep the people faithful to the order established by the Roman Empire and win their support. Unlike the Roman emperors, Brazilian rulers did not offer bread, but mainly the circus represented by World Cup as a political instrument to keep the Brazilian people faithful to the established order and win their support.
As for the true patriotism, antithesis of false Brazilian seasonal patriotism, it is important to observe that it is a feeling that means loving the country as if you love a father, a mother or your children, loving your people as brothers, feeling and knowing how to share the pain and suffering of his people, to suffer from the violation and outrage of the motherland, to assume and demonstrate his patriotic feeling before any circumstance, to live his daily life as a child of his land even miles from distance, denounce loud and clear, wherever it is, those who oppress and make suffer the brothers of the motherland, do not compromise with national or foreign criminals who use the mother country for their illicit business and only for their own benefit, not to compose with those who increase hatred and divisionism among the siblings of the motherland, whatever motivates them, not to compromise with criminals who use violent means to achieve leadership of the country and not compromise with criminals who make use of weapons that should be used for the defense of the people and not to oppress the people themselves.
According to Charles de Gaulle, patriotism is when love for its own people comes first and nationalism is when hatred for other peoples comes first. From the above, being patriotic is much more than being nationalist. The terms Nationalism and Patriotism are not synonymous, although they are nowadays very often used as such. These are terms that have different histories. Patriotism has a much older history. Patriotism is a word that comes from the Greek patris. For the ancient Greeks, the word was associated with identification with and devotion to a common language, traditions and history, ethics, law, and religion. Patriotism arose long before the notion of nation-state. Even in the eighteenth century, in Western Europe, patriotism was understood as individual responsibility towards other citizens, a devotion to humanity and an ethic of equality and charity towards the most disadvantaged and those who were part of the community, irrespective of their cultural profile or ethnic origin. That is, Patriotism was not tied to an ethnicity, a geographic location, or an autonomous political organization.
It is in the nineteenth century that the concept of nationalism and nation as a political entity arises, with the right to a state (the nation-state). The Nation emerges as something to protect; hence it needs a State of its own; hence various nationalisms have led to numerous international conflicts throughout history, many of them devastating as the First and Second World War. In this sense, the concept of Nationalism is in deep contradiction with the concept of Internationalism, or cooperation and fraternal connection between communities of nations that share the same humanity. This contradiction does not exist, however, between Patriotism and Internationalism because the individual can be both patriot and internationalist.
From the above, after the presentation of the concepts of patriotism, it can be concluded that the manifestations of patriotism by the Brazilian people during the World Cup are false. It is important to note that the concepts of nationalism and internationalism were presented in this text to distinguish them from the concept of true patriotism. The unfortunate thing is that the “circus” of the World Cup in Brazil is armed with a lot of the alienated people thinking that it is acting patriotically hoping for the success of the Brazilian National Team while the economic problems of the Country aggravate with each passing day.
Meanwhile, Brazil, as an economic, social and political organization, is in disintegration. Signs of disintegration are evident in all parts of the country. The inability of the Brazilian government and political institutions in general to offer effective responses to overcoming the political, economic and social crisis in which the Brazilian nation is debating and to curb unbridled corruption in all the powers of the Republic today tend to contribute to the increase of political violence in Brazil. Without the solution of these problems, the country may be convulsed as it did in the 1960s when sectors of the extreme right managed the coup that toppled President Joao Goulart.
Chaos has already settled in Brazil. The German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, who followed the terrible Nazi years in Berlin, wrote in 1985 a book called The Law and the Order (Editora Instituto Liberal, 1997), that anarchy, defined as the general absence of respect for social norms, usually precedes to totalitarian regimes. In the state of anarchy, the norms regulating the behavior of people lose their validity. Violations of standards simply are no longer punished. In this context, all the sanctions seem to have disappeared. The “social contract”, understood here as standards accepted and maintained through sanctions imposed by the competent authorities, is torn, leaving the vacuum in its place. Everything happens to be seen as allowed, since nothing else seems to be punished.
There is no way to dissociate this situation described by Dahrendorf from Brazil’s current grave situation where impunity is increasing and the basic values of civilization are completely weakened. Politicians commit crimes in the light of day, nothing happens, and voters themselves still vote for them again as a result of their alienation. Convicted of “white collar”, for example, they go to the prison, but soon they are released by the Supreme Court. The belief that laws no longer work is widespread in Brazil. Brazil is already experiencing, unfortunately, the anarchy described by Ralf Dahrendorf.
* Fernando Alcoforado, 78, member of the Bahia Academy of Education, engineer and doctor in Territorial Planning and Regional Development by the University of Barcelona, university professor and consultant in the areas of strategic planning, business planning, regional planning and planning of energy systems, is the author of 13 books addressing issues such as Globalization and Development, Brazilian Economy, Global Warming and Climate Change, The Factors that Condition Economic and Social Development, Energy in the world and The Great Scientific, Economic, and Social Revolutions that Changed the World.
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